Airport Express finicky?

OK guys, I have the latest generation AEBS and I was hoping for some input from the rest of you that use one. This device seems kinda weird to me in ways. Last night I did a speed test and I was missing about 10Mbps of downstream from my connection. I looked online and saw post about the device acting weird if you have your MobileMe info loaded, so I removed all of that but the speed was still crawling along at 10Mbps, down from my normal 20Mbps. I restarted my cable modem, Vonage box, etc. and nothing seemed to work to improve the download speed.

As a final step I restored the AE and ran through the setup again and all of the defaults are on Automatic (which they were before) and after that I get my 20Mbps back on my download speeds. It has been testing great since last night, but I wanted to know if there was something else I should be looking at in the device config that I may be missing.

TIA

So do you have an Airport Express or the AEBS which is the Airport Extreme base station?

And what else is connected to you network?

schweb said:

So do you have an Airport Express or the AEBS which is the Airport Extreme base station?

And what else is connected to you network?

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Sorry, the Airport Extreme base station is what I have.

I have 3 mac's, 2 windows machines, DirecTV, ATV1, ATV2, Blu-Ray player, Wii, PS3, XBox, Airport express, HP Printer all connected to the network.

I should also add that when I had my DIR-655 installed before it died I never had this issue. I just checked on speakeasy.net and I am down to about 14Mbps right now and I was getting 20 last night. If I go straight off of the cable modem I actually hit about 22Mbps.

I have to say, that the Airport Extreme is not at all finicky generally. It's regarded as one of the most solid, albeit expensive, routers available. Personally, I've been using them for almost a decade now without any problems.

If you have a mixed network of b/g/n devices, that could impact your performance based on how your network is setup and what is accessing it at the time.

I have the latest Airport Extreme and I have no problem pulling speeds like this consistently:



Have you tried different speed test servers or disconnecting various devices to see if one is slowing it down?

Dang, nice speeds!

Yes, I have tried various servers and all report the same general speed. Most of the devices are generally sleeping, but I have not done any unplugging yet. I will try that next. All of the wireless devices on the network are N, and the Blu-Ray, ATV1, and DirecTV plug in to the AEBS directly.

I thought these things were pretty rock solid. I just wonder if there could be any hardware issue with the device itself.

There may be. Are you absolutely sure none of these other devices are connecting to the net and doing something when you're running your test?

schweb said:

There may be. Are you absolutely sure none of these other devices are connecting to the net and doing something when you're running your test?

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Pretty darn sure, but to make sure I will shut it all down with the exception of may MacBook and see what I get. If I can't get it figured out I will see what our friendly Apple boys say about it.

Thanks for your help.

JohnCL said:

Pretty darn sure, but to make sure I will shut it all down with the exception of may MacBook and see what I get. If I can't get it figured out I will see what our friendly Apple boys say about it.

Thanks for your help.

Click to expand...

Good luck! Also try changing the channel for your network. Maybe there's wireless interference causing problems.

schweb said:

Good luck! Also try changing the channel for your network. Maybe there's wireless interference causing problems.

Click to expand...

Will do, and thanks again for all of your input. Really appreciate it.